Saturday, May 16, 2009

Excitement Is Over, WolframAlpha Opens To All

WolframAlpha, most awaited search engine in recent days finally went live yesterday. It provides a new way to get data for your query. They say its not another search engine to compete Google, Yahoo or Live, but its a computational knowledge engine: it generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base, instead of searching the web and returning links.

Finally it was launched yesterday. You can see the live webcast video here. First tweet for the announcement is here which is almost 5 hours back. It looks like just after it went live, it draw a huge traffic and later it was dropping.

I tried to test my first query “benzene” and it shows me error.

Though later it worked fine. It is also taking more time to generate results compared to Google. As it is in early state, so later it will be taken care.

Something interesting is when you search for a company, it provides couple of useful information such as the last trade value, market capital, revenue, employees, daily return analysis via histogram etc.

One can see some of the example pages here. When i do mathematical calculation here as well as on Google, Google looks very fast in providing result compared to WolframAlpha.